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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Carlos Lyra: 60 Years of Bossa Nova

Carlos Lyra will celebrate the 60th anniversary
of his career this year with concerts in several major Brazilian cities and the recording of a live DVD, both mostly likely in September. The
singer-guitarist-songwriter is one of bossa nova's key figures and most
important composers. João Gilberto recorded three of Lyra's songs—"Maria
Ninguém" (Maria Nobody), "Lobo Bobo" (Foolish Wolf) and
"Saudade Fez Um Samba" (Saudade Made a Samba*)—on Chega de Saudade (1959), generally
regarded as the first bossa nova album. Lyra was one of the first bossa artists
to release a solo album, in 1960. And he took the genre in new directions in
the early '60s, with polemical lyrics and his involvement in musical theater
productions that protested social injustice in Brazil.

Antonio Carlos Jobim praised Lyra as a "great melodist"
and "formidable composer," while Marcos Valle commented that Lyra
"was the guy who knew how to create bossa nova's most beautiful melodies.
Tom [Jobim] was fantastic, with his harmonies and everything, but the melodies
of Carlinhos were unbeatable." In the early '60s, Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd,
Zoot Sims, Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, Quincy Jones Vince Guaraldi, Phil Woods,
Paul Winter, Lalo Schifrin, Astrud Gilberto, Sérgio Mendes and even Brigitte
Bardot recorded Lyra's songs. And Paul Winter performed "Maria Ninguém"
at the Kennedy White House in 1962.

Kay Lyra and her father Carlos perform "Você e Eu" on live TV

Despite all this, Lyra's works have had much less of a
presence in international jazz and pop recordings since the '60s, as opposed to
Jobim, whose compositions are still heavily performed and recorded. In part,
this is because Lyra fell out of favor with Brazil's military, which overthrew
a democratic government in 1964, and he went into a self-imposed exile from
1964 to 1971. This took him away from the Brazilian recording industry for a
long and crucial period in his career, and he spent most of his exile in
Mexico, hardly a launching pad for global recognition at the time. Lyra always
marched to his own drummer and never put much effort into establishing a career
in the U.S., as did Jobim and many other Brazilian musicians. "I never
pursued success, not even in Brazil," Lyra comments. "I always
pursued quality. My songs, when they were heard, were accepted and recorded by
many in the whole world, without my having to ask, do marketing or let go of my
life and my tranquility in order to run after success."

As a result of this, Lyra is still a musical hero in Brazil,
for his bossa nova classics and for being a symbol of the resistance during the
dictatorship, but his catalog of songs lies largely untouched overseas. In the
new millennium, Phil Woods and Barbara Casini have covered Lyra's "Você e
Eu" (You and I) in 2001, Luciana Souza recorded "Se É Tarde Me
Perdoa" (If It's Late, Forgive Me) in 2003, andRosa Passos interpreted "Lobo Bobo" in 2004. But such
efforts are few and far between, and the last ten years have seen an even
bigger drought. Jazz and pop artists who appreciate Brazilian music would do
well to acquaint themselves with Lyra's work, which is a somewhat undiscovered
source of bossa classics, with great melodies and rich harmonies.

Lyra was unusual for bossa nova in that he was both a
charismatic performer and an acclaimed songwriter; the other principal artists were mostly good at one or the other thing. Jazz saxophonist Paul Winter teamed with Lyra on The Sound of Ipanema album in 1965 and
recalls, "He was a little more outgoing than João [Gilberto]. I remember
many nights when Carlos just would melt the clothes off every lady in the room.
That guy had a magic that probably surpasses that of any other performer I’ve
ever known. His music was so alluring and sensual. His melodies are gorgeous,
whereas João didn’t write and Jobim didn’t perform a lot."

Lyra started his career precociously. Born in 1936 in Rio de
Janeiro, he wrote his first song "Quando Chegares" (When You Arrive)
in 1954. The next year, singer Sylvia Telles recorded Antonio Carlos Jobim and
Newton Mendonça's "Foi a Noite" (It Was the Night); the other side of
the single was the young Lyra's composition "Menina" (Girl). Around
this time, he began frequenting the Plaza Bar in the Hotel Plaza in Leme, a
neighborhood adjacent to Copacabana. It was a formative site for the creators
of bossa nova, a place for the likes of Johnny Alf, Jobim, Gilberto, João
Donato, Baden Powell, Sylvia Telles, and Dolores Duran to share musical ideas.

Jobim, Vinícius, Bôscoli, Menescal and Lyra

In 1956, Lyra opened a guitar academy with high school buddy
Roberto Menescal, who would become another major figure in bossa nova. One of
their students was a young Nara Leão, whose parent's Copacabana apartment
became a favorite spot for jam sessions and who later became one of bossa's
most renowned singers. By the next year, singer-guitarist João Gilberto had introduced
the bossa nova beat to his musician friends, distilling samba rhythms into a
simpler and irresistible pattern and acting as a catalyst for much great
songwriting to come. Lyra, though, remembers Gilberto as having
introduced his new beat at an earlier date, and doesn't give it as much importance
as others do, seeing it as part of bossa's repertoire rather than its essential
rhythm.

The new style of music made its public debut with Lyra and
others before some two hundred people at Rio's Clube Hebráica (Hebrew Club) in
1957. Either the club's events director or an anonymous secretary billed the
night's offerings as "Today, Sylvia Telles, Carlos Lyra and the bossa nova
group." From that point on, "bossa nova" became accepted as a
label for the new style. Odeon released Gilberto's recordings of "Chega de
Saudade" and "Desafinado" in 1958, and the album Chega de Saudade in 1959, the latter produced
by Jobim and including three Lyra songs as well as three Jobim tunes in the mix.

But Lyra became fed up with the Odeon label's delay
in recording him and others and signed with Philips, for which he recorded his
first album Bossa Nova in 1959,
released in May 1960. This created a small rupture in bossa nova, with some
musicians staying with Odeon, which had been nurturing them for some time and
making promises, and others going to Philips.

Also in 1960, Lyra began his collaborations with poet and
lyricist Vinícius de Moraes, who replaced Ronaldo Bôscoli as his main
songwriting partner. Vinícius was the genre's most important lyricist and
Jobim's frequent collaborator, and wrote the words for "Garota de Ipanema."
Philips released Lyra's second album Carlos
Lyra in 1961, and the next year he appeared on Bossa Nova Mesmo with Sylvia Telles, Vinícius and Oscar
Castro-Neves, and Bossa Nova at Carnegie
Hall, the live recording of the historic concert that introduced many of
bossa's main figures to an American audience.

In front: Carlos Lyra, Nara Leão and Vinícius de Moraes

By 1961, with bossa nova booming in Brazil, Lyra had already
begun to take his art in a new direction, co-founding the leftist CPC (The People's
Center for Culture) of the UNE (National Student's Union), which sought to
create revolutionary popular art and popular art forms to take the masses out
of "alienation and submission." The
CPC also sought to facilitate interchanges between the culture of the povo
(the "people," i.e., the poor and working class) and the middle class. At this time, Lyra had begun to
feel that bossa nova needed socially conscious lyrics and that, as he would
later say, it had "a hell of a lot of form, but lacked content."

He and Vinícius wrote the musical Pobre Menina
Rica (Poor Little Rich Girl) in 1962. It had politically conscious
lyrics, such as those of the electrifying "Maria Moita," which
manages in just a few words to be both a protest against social inequality and
an early feminist anthem. Pobre Menina
Rica was released as an album in '64, staged in France
that year, and translated into Spanish by novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A young Antonio Adolfo participated as a pianist in the
musical. "It was a privilege
having Carlos Lyra invite me and my Trio 3D to participate in the wonderful and
magical play by him and Vinícius. He was the one who baptized my trio. We
worked on Pobre Menina Rica for three
or four months from December 1963 through March 1964, at the Teatro de Bolso in
Ipanema. Jobim always mentioned, 'Carlos Lyra was the finest melodist of bossa
nova' and I agree completely. His songs are so inspired, and the combination of
melody and harmony is really something. Later, during the '90s, when I worked
with him again as arranger and producer of his Bossa Lyra album, I had the chance to go deeper into his songs and become more and more passionate for his music. He is one of the greatest composers of all time."

Vinícius de Moraes and Carlos Lyra

Also in 1963, another of Lyra's new songs was the polemical "Canção do Subdesenvolvido" (Song of the Underdeveloped) about economic exploitation, written with Chico de Assis; it was censored the next
year. Lyra was the musical director of Teatro de Arena, which staged controversial productions. One of their most famous shows was Opinião, directed by Augusto Boal, which protested Brazil's poverty and social problems and in which Lyra played an important role.

While working on a film soundtrack, Lyra had visited Mangueira, a poor neighborhood that is home to a venerable samba school of the same name, and gotten to know Cartola, who introduced him to fellow samba composers Nelson Cavaquinho, Zé Keti and Elton Medeiros. They met often at the apartment of Lyra, who sought to introduce their music to a wider public. He introduced them to bossa singer Nara Leão, who would record their songs on her 1964 album Nara; one of the tunes was Keti's "Diz Que Fui Por Ai," which became a hit. Later, Leão, Keti and northeastern composer João do Vale starred in the
politically charged musical Opinião, which debuted in December and was a big success. Lyra contributed two songs, "Lamento de Um Homem Só (Song of a Man Alone) and "Marcha da Quarta-Feira de Cinzas" (Ash Wednesday March) and was present in the early rehearsals of the show, a precursor of the MPB (eclectic post-bossa Brazilian popular music) to come with its mixing of bossa, samba and regional music.

While Lyra wanted to take bossa nova in a different direction, he also surprised some CPC colleagues by unashamedly stating that he was part of the bourgeoisie and that he created bourgeois, not popular, culture. He was always true to himself and wouldn't let others sway him. When Lyra appeared
in one of the first televised bossa performances, on TV Excelsior in São Paulo,
he was told backstage beforehand that he would be offered some Mentex chewing
gum (Mentex was one of the show's sponsors) and should say, "Thank you. I
love Mentex." He refused, replying that he wouldn't plug their product or anyone
else's for free. The show's representatives didn't give up and tried to force
the issue. During the performance, a girl dressed as a bunny approached him and
asked if he'd like some Mentex. "No, I hate it," he replied on live
television.

The Sound of Ipanema (1965) with Paul Winter (left) and Carlos Lyra (right)

In 1964, he recorded the The
Sound of Ipanema with Paul Winter (released in '65) and appeared
at the Newport Jazz Festival with Stan Getz. His career was flourishing, but
the military had overthrown Brazil's democratically elected government on March
31 of that year. Lyra knew his days there were numbered, as sooner or later the
government would come after him. He left Brazil, came back, and left again,
this time for seven years. While he was gone, he toured with Getz in 1965 and
'66, and decided to relocate to Mexico, where he lived for five years. While there, he married the American
actress-model Katherine Lee Riddell (now Kate Lyra); their daughter Kay is now a
singer.

After he returned to Brazil for good, he still had to tread carefully. His
album Herói de Medo (Fear's Hero),
recorded in 1974, was initially censored entirely. He left to live in Los
Angeles for two years, where he took Arthur Janov's "primal scream" therapy
(there, he met John Lennon, a fellow participant) and studied astrology. Since
his return to Brazil in 1976, he has performed often, but recorded relatively few works,
with the exception of the retrospectives Bossa
Lyra (1993) and Sambalanço (2000); Carioca de Algema (Carioca in Handcuffs), a 1994 album of
original songs; and group efforts like Vivendo
Vinícius Ao Vivo (1998), with Baden Powell, Miúcha, Toquinho, and Os Bossa Nova (2008) withRoberto Menescal, Marcos Valle and João
Donato.

-Much of the background information is from a 2013 interview with Carlos Lyra by Chris McGowan (for The Brazilian Music Book).
-Jobim quote from Carlos Lyra Songbook (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Lumiar, 1994).

About Me

I'm the author of "The Brazilian Music Book," a collection of interviews with iconic Brazilian musicians, and co-author of "The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music of Brazil" (Temple University Press). I have contributed blogs and articles about music, culture, and the environment to The Huffington Post, Billboard and many other publications. I have also worked on Portuguese/English translations for academics, government agencies and major corporations. I can be reached at the email here and at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismcgowan.